We just got our hands on a copy of the new, redesigned, so pretty New Republic (being traditionalists, we prefer to wait until it arrives in the mail days after it comes out)! You've probably seen it— it's the one with the 9th grade art class painting of Barack Obama on the cover. Anyway, there's a nice little note from the editors about the redesign, about the new, thicker magazine, the better quality paper (shiny!), the original art (see above), and the photography (floating heads of David Sedaris!). There's also a number you can call for "human interaction" about the redesign, so we decided to give them a ring. We hoped that Frank or even Marty himself would answer!

Unfortunately, all we got was a stern-sounding subscription bot, probably lodged somewhere deep in the American Heartland. We told her we were calling about the redesign, and she seemed confused. "About what? A redesign?" We explained that the magazine's editors had instructed readers to call if they had questions about the redesign. We asked why the magazine had been redesigned. "Call the publisher—they haven't shared that reasoning with us." Interesting! We asked if we would still be getting the same number of issues that we had paid for. "Your subscription will still run the same amount of time," she told us. Same amount of time, but not the same number of issues! Someone is trying to hoodwink us.

"They just doubled up on the issues," she sighed. "You'll get 24 issues of 44, but each will be double the thickness they were. It's like 24 double issues as opposed to single issues." We could sense she was getting impatient, and so we hung up before we could discuss Adam Zagajewski's poem, translated from the Polish all New Yorker style, or that weird headline on the Sam Tanenhaus piece—"Athwart History"? Really? Did Marty come up with that?

The New New Republic [TNR]